The success of scientists from the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Adam Mickiewicz University in the world’s most important competition in the field of automatic translation. PhD students: Artur Nowakowski, Gabriela Pałka and two undergraduate students: Mikołaj Pokrywka and Kamil Guttmann took first places in two translation directions: Ukrainian-Czech and Czech-Ukrainian, leaving behind, among others, Google and Microsoft translators.
The competition called “General MT Shared Task” was held as part of the Workshop for Machine Translation 2022 conference (Conference on Machine Translation – https://statmt.org/wmt22), which is the most prestigious conference in the field of machine translation.
Mikołaj Pokrywka i Kamil Guttmann, Gabriela Pałka, Artur Nowakowski, photo: Adam Mickiewicz University
The scientists task was to create the best possible translator, able to translate texts from various fields. – This year, the main areas on which the competition was focused were: news, social media, human conversations (e.g. chat) and e-commerce – explains Artur Nowakowski, who led the team. – We took part in the Czech-Ukrainian and Ukrainian-Czech translation courses. According to the published results based on automatic evaluation (where the machine assesses the quality of the translation), we took first place in both directions – adds the scientist. It is worth mentioning that the team used only the data provided by the competition organizers, as opposed to systems that could use any resources, which usually leads to a much better translation quality, as in the case of Google or Microsoft systems.
The creation of the translation system took about 2 months: – During this time, we tried various methods based on neural networks that would be able to obtain the best possible translation. To create the system, an efficient computing server was needed, which we purchased as part of the AMU Artificial Intelligence Center – says Artur Nowakowski. Both he and Gabriela Pałka cooperate with CSI.
A conference summarizing this year’s results will be held on 7-8 December in Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates). Until then, all the translation systems participating in the competition will also undergo human evaluation, where professional translators will manually assess the quality of the translations generated by the system.
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Adam Mickiewicz University, photo: Adam Mickiewicz University
Source: Adam Mickiewicz University
Read more about AMU
